Tallone

The saint at the gate. There were lots of religious imagery around the place.

The main house--which had thick stone walls, two fire places, and a light. Of which I had none!

My truly humble abode. It was big, but all the harder to warm up.


My ride up into the snow. It was so bright and pretty! But the ride home was COLD.


Citroen! I was trying to take a picture of the mountains in the background. Otherwise, it's just a picture of the parking lot at the beach. The beach was pretty. No pictures.
High cloud on a lovely day. This was taken in a parking lot in Giasconnetti, where we ended up after a series of haphazard run-abouts. Sylvian had said that a friend of his was going to Corte for the afternoon, so we went to the library to wait for him. Then Sylvian left his phone in the library after it closed, so he couldn't call his friend to find out where we were meeting him. So we went to the beach instead, and then, on the way home, we passed his friend who had been waiting for us at the house. Giasconnetti was a pretty little town, but it was just a shopping trip, and with Sylvian glued to my side, it was hard to do what I wanted, mainly, buy bread and EAT MEAT! I snuck away and had a pastry in the parking lot. Apples and custard and pastry. Yum.


I went to a party in Tallone! It was at the hall, and we were invited by an ancient man whose name was Charles and liked to tell me how to make wine and sausage. A crew of women made a really heavy, tasty polenta made out of chataigne--chestnuts. It was somewhere between cake and pudding, and not very sweet, but super yummy. There was also really thick, dark sausage from the town across the valley, but I feared the wrath of the militant raw vegan, so abstained. Okay, I snuck a little taste, and it was good! Then the deserts came out--and a LOT of them. Cake--several different kinds of cake--plus cookies and fruit. The fruit was mostly used as missiles by this guy at the other end of our table.

Then, The guy in the middle broke out his accordion, and he and the guy to his left sang until their voices broke. Apparently, most Corsican songs make fun of themselves, and there was a rather famous Quebecois song in the melage, but I didn't know it.













This is something, or it used to be something. My bike is parked inside! But seeing it reminded me of the Chilcotins, where my family has a cabin. The land there is full of abandoned shacks.











Cork Oak! Isn't it pretty? They're everywhere, and huge.














And cork, close up.













These are the tools I had to work with!!! The tires on all the wheelbarrows were flat as pancakes. But at least the saws were sharp, an improvement over the situation in Laroque.













The Shitbox! Well, that's what it was called. I thought I misunderstood Sylvian at first, because I was in French mode. Nope! Well, compost toilets have to be emptied. The compost from the toilets is ready after a year, and is generally used to fertilise trees and not gardens, due to a very small risk of passing on--I don't know. E.Coli? Anyway, anyone getting grossed out needs to visit a farm. Fertiliser comes from somewhere.













These, I think, are lemons. Well, they are citrus, at any rate. The closest one kind of looks like the Venus of Wilhendorff, or...? I swear it's not from the fertiliser...













This is just to prove that EVERYTHING can be made out of pallets. And at the farm in Tallone, everything was.













The dog and the cat. A really annoying cat. A really big dog. He was a Great Pyrenees, I think, and looked just like my parents' dogs, but BIGGER. Total sweetheart, though his size scared me when he started leaning on me.













And this is my little stove, my little leaky stove that filled my bungalow with smoke and stained my clothes with the stink of fire. I'm cooking! Coffee and chesnuts. Chestnuts are really quick to do, which would why I was such an utter failure at them as a kid, and coffee boiled with cinnamon is not too bad. Not a bad start to that day, let me tell you!